years after his death, his two nieces were under the necessity of selling for a few hundred francs the gold medal bestowed upon their uncle by Louis XVIII. "Such," says a French writer, "was the gratitude of the manufacturing interests of Lyons to the man to whom it owes so large a portion of its splendour."
It would be easy to extend the martyrology of inventors, and to cite the names of other equally distinguished men who have, without any corresponding advantage to themselves, contributed to the industrial progress of the age, for it has too often happened that genius has planted the tree, of gathered which patient dulness has gathered the fruit; but we will confine ourselves for the present to a brief account of an inventor of comparatively recent date, by way of illustration of the difficulties and privations which it is so frequently the lot of mechanical genius to surmount. We allude to Joshua Heilmann, the inventor of the combing-machine.
Heilmann was born in 1796 at Mulhouse, the principal seat of the Alsace cotton manufacture. His father was engaged in that business; and Joshua entered his office at fifteen. He remained there for two years, employing his spare time in mechanical drawing. He afterwards spent two years in his uncle's banking-house in Paris, prosecuting the study of mathematics in the evenings. Some of his relatives having established a small cotton-spinning factory at Mulhouse, young Heilmann was placed with Messrs. Tissot & Rey, at Paris, to learn the practice of that firm. At the same time he became a student at the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, where he attended the lectures, and studied the machines in the museum. He also
